On Feeling Like It’s Christmas Eve the Night Before Marriage Equality

I feel like a kid on a Christmas Eve. It’s less than two hours away, but I can’t wait for the Marriage Equality Act to become law.

It’s a little odd that I’m so excited. After all, New York same-sex marriage does nothing for me personally right now, and it was unable to salvage my relationship with a foreign national I fell in love with.

And yet, I know this is a momentous occasion in the civil rights history of our nation. I have been so blessed to talk to people about why it is important to them. Over at the Voice, I was  able to interview the first couple that’s getting married, and one of the four Republican senators who changed his mind this year, and the National Organization for Marriage defector. I am continually touched by people’s stories of love, evolution, and change.

And I’m damn proud right now to be a citizen of the Empire State, which is taking a morally righteous stance tomorrow and leading the nation and the world on LGBT equality.

Also tomorrow, I’m going back to Middle Collegiate Church for the first time in a very long time. I have cut my ties there, largely because I don’t respect the Senior Minister nor the board, but a memorial service is being held for an old friend of mine. I am looking forward, in a strange way, to saying my goodbyes, and also to seeing so many old dear souls. Many of us who have left the church will be in attendance. Middle was a huge part of my own civil rights journey, as well as my acceptance and celebration of my own sexuality. It will be bittersweet and, dare I say, spiritual to have a moment there, the first place I ever fought for same-sex marriage, while celebrating the life of a dear straight friend who used to sing with us on our gospel choir’s float in the Pride Parade.

It’s going to be a hard night to sleep. But I better. It will be a long and hot, if wonderfully, day tomorrow, quite full of all dimensions of the human experience.